An efficient and robust method to determine the optimal tap coefficients of high speed FIR equalizer

The FIR equalizer is a common way to compensate for the effect of ISI in high speed data transmission. One key issue for the FIR equalizer design is to find the optimal tap coefficient（TC） set. In this work,the TC search is formulated as an eye-diagram based global optimization problem and an efficient and robust multi-start point（MSP） optimizer is developed and applied to determine the optimal TC set. To guarantee a robust optimization procedure, an objective function based on the eye diagram is studied. It proves that a 330 x speedup is provided by the proposed method as compared with the Monte Carlo method. With the proposed method, the optimal design point of the equalizer can be further estimated.